Lakhimpur Kheri - Continued

 October 8, 2021

I slept five hours and woke up on this same day that I wrote that last post on. I’m tired but still rumbling.  

 

Lakhimpur Kheri still haunts me, there is so much to unpack. There are two other stories that have also held my attention over the last two weeks. One from Assam where a video of a government employed journalist, documenting the governments eviction of people squatting on government land, is seen jumping savagely on the corpse of a man who has already fallen to police bullets to his chest. I wonder, and also know, how that kind of rage develops. The other story on my radar is the arrest of the 23-year-old son of a famous Bollywood actor at a rave party by the Central Narcotics Bureau. The boy didn’t have drugs in his possession, between his friends and him they had a quantity, not large, of party drugs. Drugs are bad and they should be punished, right? But he didn’t have any on him and he has still been held in custody by NCB from October 2^nd till date. There is other murkiness there as some questionable persons were also present during the arrest and in the room where the young people were held in custody. Also a possible political angle.

 

Some would say to me, what about the Kashmir killings by the new Islamic terrorist group, The Resistance Front, targeting Kashmiri Pundits and Sikhs. That story is important too as is the rising prices of fuel and cooking gas that are choking people into desperation. That is perhaps the most important story of all, as it impacts employment, hunger, inflation, education, and more. 

 

But it is Lakhimpur Kheri that holds my attention. Today I woke thinking of the 19-year-old boy who had died, felled down by the fast moving jeep. His mother, I heard is extremely unwell and in need of medical attention. The family think the boy was killed by a bullet and wanted an autopsy. The autopsy report copy which they were given, largely illegible they said, didn’t mention the bullet. 

 

I wish I could believe that autopsy report. It's hard to live, constantly disbelieving Institutions and people in power. The UP authorities have lied so much, falsified so much information, suppressed so many truths—the floating corpses in the Ganges vs the statements that UP had barely any covid deaths, or those images of patients struggling for oxygen while UP declared the state didn’t have an oxygen shortage—that I don’t trust anything they say now. I also remember the girl who was raped by Kuldeep Singh Sengar a BJP MP, and her long suffering road to justice. 

 

So yes, it is like the boy who cried wolf syndrome, where the sheep suffer for the boys lies. All authorities lie, they all spread misinformation, possibly hate. They all use institutions that trample legal and constitutional guidelines. IT cells create the narratives they want people to believe. It is hard to trust that justice and truth will prevail in that field. 

 

When the furious mob turned on the people who had run over their mates, it made sense to that dark part of me that loves law and order episodes where the bad guy gets his chips. Mob justice has been used by Hindutva groups to control the minorities. We all have heard the calls to lynch those who deal in beef, or traffic in love jihad. We all have seen the viral lynching videos some with policemen in attendance. We all have seen the perpetrators walk free. 

 

Of course, the BJP supporters shouldn’t have died. Of course, the farmers shouldn’t have died. When a question was asked on a news channel, that tries to be neutral, ‘Were the deaths equivalent?’ I was stunned. I was even more stunned with the answer, and my own thoughts about it. 

 

I feel for all the dead. Four farmers, three BJP workers from the cars, and a reporter. The men in the cars who died were just there. I don’t know what they were thinking when they realized that the driver wasn’t slowing down. That he was going to ram through the crowd. I did see the rage on the face of the driver driving the jeep. I don’t think the BJP workers deserved to die. But the deaths were not equivalent.

 

The farmers were willfully mowed down while the mob that killed the BJP workers gave in to a fury that in part was created by the BJP leaders themselves. I know this justification is morally questionable, even reprehensible. Those videos asking BJP workers to go after the farmers, that threat to them by the Minister of Home Affairs all were provoking them to violence. I think it all was part of a game plan to instigate the farmers to violence and then blame them for it while never taking responsibility for any violence, verbal or otherwise from their side. The farmers, and I, are also part of the culture where hate speech and mob lynching’s by the Hindutva brigade have gone unpunished. Where policemen have not been held accountable. Nobody in power has. They probably felt, like I do, that they were unlikely to get justice. 

 

In that split second of being there on that the ground where their mates were lying dead, I don’t really know what they thought. But the above is not the way I want to think and it is this kind of thinking that will lead to anarchy and complete breakdown of society. But are we not being led there daily by our elected leaders? 

 

There were people in the mob who didn’t succumb to their rage. Who grabbed the men in the car and handed them over to the police. I hope that if I had been on the scene, I would have done that and not been one of those who beat a man to death. I don’t think, no I know, I would never mow down a row of people just because they were BJP leaders, who I have furious feelings about. But then I have not repeatedly associated those leaders with being termites or cockroaches. They are humans. 

 

Much to think about. Mostly about the kind of world I want to live in and how to not absorb the hateful messages spewed by those in power.

 

Thanks again for reading. I had my booster shot this week and have been a bit fevered and fatigued. Mostly just done my writing class-work and written this.